The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) by Brad Magnarella (best business books of all time txt) 📕

Which meant—

I threw a light shield up just as searing fire broke around me. In the sudden blaze, the remaining druids became illuminated. From the shadows of hoods, tattooed lips peeled from purple gums and fierce teeth. Wands of what looked like burned ash appeared from billowing sleeves.

Fire casters. And here I’d been hoping for the meadow-prancing type of druid. I aimed my sword at the one blocking my path and shouted, “Vigore!”

The energy that coursed down the blade slammed the druid from his sandals and into the trees. The rippling wake knocked two more druids onto their backs. An opening! I hit the gap at a run, calling more energy to my staff and shaping it into a protective dome of light.

I grunted as fresh fire jetted hot against it.

After the day’s encounter with Bashi and the White Hand, I wasn’t in any shape for an extended battle. Especially not when I was outnumbered by magic users, who, by the force of their casting, must have been calling up power from a god. It also explained how they were able to create a refuge for themselves in Central Park. Trying to match them blow for blow would only bring on Thelonious, which was the last thing I needed tonight.

“Face your doom, fiend!” the head druid called.

Nope. I’d made the trail and had no plans of turning around.

But I’d barely hit my first full stride when a stone from the crumbling arch tumbled into my path. Damned druid magic. I managed to leap that one but a second stone materialized beneath my landing foot. I hit it awkwardly, and pain flared through my folding ankle. I stumbled and went down.

Robes shuffled up behind me. I rolled onto my back, ready to nail them with another force invocation. But I couldn’t even raise my sword arm. I strained through gritted teeth and tried to assist with my staff arm, but it was like hefting a pair of dead animals. My tongue and lips garbled around a word that hadn’t the power to invoke anything.

…the hell?

That was when something warm and wet spread across the front of my pants. Well, craptastic. I had loaded the encumbering potion into a squirt gun, which I’d holstered into my waist band—and apparently just crushed. The contact with my skin was releasing the potion’s magic, not to mention the god-awful stench, transforming me into a smelly, dull-witted slug.

Fourteen all over again, basically.

The druids swooped around me, ember-tipped wands aimed at my face. With no Words to resurrect my shield, I was as good as cooked. I released my sword and staff at sloth speed and showed my hands.

“Whhuuaaiit,” I slurred.

The lead druid emerged through the others and stood over me. The hood had fallen away to reveal a shiny shaved head and strong face, ebony skin patterned with intricate white lines. Like my mental prism, the tattoos were designed to channel energy. The druid’s eyes, a fierce turquoise in the light of the wands, searched mine. When the druid spoke again, I realized the person wasn’t a man, but a woman—their high priestess.

“Raise it up,” she ordered.

It? I thought. Oh right, the demon. I glanced around at the others as they stooped down. Though they remained hooded, I guessed by their movements that they were all women.

Several of them seized me beneath the shoulders and hoisted me to my feet. I stepped gingerly, and very slowly, on my twisted right ankle. I should have been terrified, but the potion was fogging my fear. When the priestess looked me up and down, I was more concerned that the leaking potion and smell had them all thinking I’d wet my pants.

The priestess smiled around filed teeth. “A demon is no match for the fire of Brigit.”

I was pretty sure a demon as powerful as Sathanas could flick the pagan god to which she was referring like a paper football. But even if I’d wanted to point that out, I couldn’t form the words. Plus, she was moving her wand dangerously close to my face, its glowing tip drawing sweat from my pores. I tried to lean away, but it was as though my body were bound in a slow-drying cast. Exactly the effect the Plaster of Paris ingredient had been meant to induce.

“First,” she said, wand hovering just above my right cheek, “we burn out its eyes.”

That she was referring to me in third person neutral was chilling enough. But the pain that had begun to build across my cornea and now pierced, searing, to the back of my eye socket was far more troubling. I shut my eyelids to the heat, but she forced them open with a bracing finger and thumb.

I let out a low moan, which made the priestess show more of her teeth. This was not good. Arnaud and Bashi were dangerous, but at least they possessed some capacity for reason, however warped. This woman had none. It was written in her staring eyes. Her existence had come to revolve so completely around the return of Sathanas that every interlocutor now looked like a demon.

“That it may no more curse us with its evil sight,” she promised.

When my vision blurred, I hoped it was from tears and not the melting of my lens. Either way, it wouldn’t be long before my right socket was a smoking crater. When the priestess sucked in her next breath through the sharp spaces of her teeth, I knew it was to summon fire.

And that brought my fear screaming back.

31

I tried again to speak an invocation of protection, but I might as well have been talking through a mouthful of oatmeal. The priestess took her time pronouncing her own Word, the tip of her wand swelling orange hot, strong fingers bracing my eyelids wide.

“Ustili—garrh!” she grunted.

Huh?

The heat and glare fell away. She dropped the wand and dug both hands into